The 90% of American congregations with fewer than 200 weekly attendees are gifted communities of faith. They are strategically positioned ministries with unique small church advantages for this time. In this episode, Brandon O'Brien, author of the newly revised "The Strategically Small Church" and director of global thought leadership for Redeemer City to City, challenges the narrative that bigger automatically means better in church ministry. Drawing from nearly two decades of serving pastors worldwide, Brandon reveals how small churches possess distinct small church advantages including radical particularity, authentic community, and the agility to contextualize ministry for specific populations that larger congregations simply cannot replicate.

Brandon shares practical insights about leveraging small church advantages through asset-based thinking, focusing on worship, formation, and mission as a minimally viable ecclesiology, and embracing authenticity as a powerful evangelistic tool in our current cultural moment. Whether you're pastoring a rural congregation of 15 or an urban church of 150, this conversation will help you notice your assets and strategic strengths for ministry and mission in this time. God loves congregations of all sizes. Smaller membership congregations are strategic powerhouses positioned for meaningful mission and ministry in your particular community. Discover why the future of faithful church leadership may well depend on understanding and maximizing these essential small church advantages.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Pivot Podcast where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile and I'm joined today by special guest host, Jon Anderson, who's the director of role ministry here at Luther Seminary and former bishop in the ELCA.

Today we're excited to welcome Brandon O'Brien, the author of the newly revised and expanded book, The Strategically Small Church. Brandon is director of global thought leadership for the Redeemer City to City. He's a pastor who has served in several small congregations. He's a ministry strategist and a speaker who has spent nearly two decades serving pastors and church leaders worldwide. In a culture that often celebrates bigger as better.

Brandon offers a really refreshing perspective. He challenges us to see the gifts of smaller membership congregations. And Brandon encourages us to notice how the 90 % of American churches that see fewer than 200 weekly attendees are actually uniquely positioned for authentic ministry in this current cultural moment. Welcome, Brandon.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.

So Brandon, tell us a bit about your own ministry story and background and how did you come to value small churches in particular?

Yeah, grew up in a Southern Baptist Church. ⁓ referred to the entering ministry as surrendering to the call. And so I surrendered to the call when I was ⁓ 17 and almost immediately was sent from our large church to do kind of guest speaking in smaller churches in the area. ⁓ I went to college to prepare for ministry and had every expectation that eventually I'd be leading.

church like the one I went to, which was very large and kind of a downtown, you know, small town, but downtown church with the steeple. But my first appointment was in a small church, maybe 15 regular attendees ⁓ in a very rural part of Arkansas. ⁓ And I had kind of internalized over time the message that small churches are small because they're unhealthy. And the time I spent in that congregation, ⁓

really challenge that assumption because the people that I encountered there were deeply mature spiritually. They were generous. ⁓ They were missional. I didn't know that word at the time, but they're very concerned about their neighbors and getting people connected to the church and to each other and to Christ. ⁓ And so I think that's probably where I began to question at least the idea that small churches are somehow flawed or problematic.

just by virtue of being small or that that's a sign of a deeper problem. And then from there, I worked for a little while for Leadership Journal, which is a magazine published by Christianity Today. And of course, we spent some time in the world of, you megachurch leadership and, you know, we went to the conferences and things, but I would encounter pastors of smaller churches at those events and hear about the ministry they were doing in their towns or their cities or their

in rural places, and was really frequently struck by a pattern that it felt to me like the most innovative ministry that I was seeing was actually coming from these smaller churches. And a lot of the ministry in the larger churches was pretty similar. It didn't really matter where the church was. They're running very similar kinds of programs and music. But the particularity and innovation of smaller churches, I just found really compelling. And so I think...

I got interested in it there and did the research for the original edition of the book. And I think since then, I've just been confirmed in that preference. And I wouldn't necessarily call it a biblical preference or, you know, that I don't know that God prefers small churches, but I certainly do. And I think that there is a lot of really exciting ministry happening in them around the country.

How do you define ⁓ small churches, And in your book, you use the language that that definition is contested. Say,

Yeah, you know, small, I've done this before where I've been at an event and I said, hey, I'm a pastor of a small church. You we have a hundred people and they say, that's not small. I have 15, that's small. And so I think there's there's a weird sort of inverse pride about, you know, pastoring the smallest congregation. I think it's contested because it's certainly the case that a congregation with 20 people

has different challenges and different opportunities than a congregation of 200. And I'm very aware of the dynamic differences, not naive to those challenges. ⁓ I define in the book the churches under 200 as small, in part because in a lot of ministry leadership material, 200 is often identified as a threshold that if you don't grow past that 200 benchmark by a certain point, it's unlikely to happen. And so it does feel like a kind of

accepted milestone in ministry materials. But the numbers in terms of just national averages are much lower than that. I don't have it right in front of me, but I think it's approaching 70 % of churches have 100 or fewer on a Sunday morning. so I think that statistically speaking, probably 100 or less would be considered small.

I sometimes think that maybe a definition is less helpful than the dynamics. And so I think one thing that's true in a small church is you often have a solo pastor or a bivocational pastor. ⁓ Very often that pastor is viewed less as a visionary that's trying to take a big church somewhere and more as a pastor who's supposed to be attentive to the needs of the congregation. ⁓ And often the ministries programs of the church are

totally run by volunteers. So you may not have a worship pastor, a youth pastor, children's minister, it's all done by volunteers. And I think that can be true in a church of 10 or a church of a hundred. And so there are similar kind of dynamics at work that make churches of roughly that size, at the very least feel like they're operating with very limited resources, that they never have quite enough to do what they feel called to do. And so,

I think I prefer the language. Yeah. I've stumbled for 15 years trying to figure out how I would want to define small. And I'm not sure I've landed in a place that I'm happy with.

Well, thanks. And that's a real struggle. I served as a leader of a lot of small membership congregations. And I know what they want to hear most is your deep appreciation for smaller membership congregations. One of the things you say in your book that's also interesting to me is you use the word strategically to describe smaller membership congregations, which I found that quite interesting. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that.

I think ⁓ one term I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to distinguish ⁓ my sort of conversation from was there are definitely intentionally small churches, micro churches, house churches, ⁓ and I have no complaints or endorsements for that kind of ministry, but wanted to ⁓ a strategically small church is not necessarily one that's small on purpose.

It's not necessarily trying to be a certain size. ⁓ But I think what makes it strategically small versus accidentally small or begrudgingly small is that ⁓ the people recognize the assets in the congregation rather than viewing their size ⁓ and perhaps lack of resources as all liability. so strategic because

They have the imagination to leverage what they have to do what they feel called to do. And I think that that makes those smaller churches strategically valuable ⁓ and not just ⁓ nostalgic or sentimentally valuable, but they actually have a really significant strategic role to play in the kingdom.

So

let's unpack some of the cultural narratives that have led to the assumption that a church should be large if it's successful or faithful even. Like where did that come from and talk with us about that a bit.

You know, the story is longer than I realized. In the research for this new edition, ⁓ found Eugene Peterson in his ⁓ autobiography about his time, I ⁓ think it's called The Pastor, ⁓ talks about the fact that church work had already become sort of commercialized or corporatized ⁓ in his childhood. And so there was a lot of desire to use ⁓ corporate

⁓ marketing strategies, communication strategies in order to enhance the experience and attract people in. And his childhood was in the 50s. And so I often associate this emphasis on larger churches with the church growth movement in the 80s and 90s. But I think there has been an undercurrent for much longer than that. think ⁓ it's partly

⁓ commercialization or consumerism, the idea that a ⁓ preoccupation with scale, that if you can have a hundred people, that's fine. But if you can have a thousand people for slightly more investment, then that's good stewardship. There's something about the efficiency of scale or economy of scale that's attractive. I do think that there is the language I hear all the time, healthy things grow. And so the idea that if a church isn't always getting bigger,

then that's a sign that something's wrong. ⁓ As someone who appears to not be getting any taller, I might say that healthy things don't grow indefinitely. ⁓ They do grow and then they multiply or they replicate or they, you know, etc. ⁓ I think they're definitely the church growth movement in the 80s and 90s ⁓ put a strong emphasis on growth as a sign of health. And I think recognizing that

There are strategic, I don't want to say formulaic, but there's almost formulaic changes you can make in your programming that will inevitably result in growth. And so if you're not growing, it's because you're making strategic mistakes that you don't have to make. And so I think there's a ⁓ level of, yeah, the corporatizing or ⁓ commercializing of church, there are the theological.

expectations of, you know, when God's Word is preached faithfully, people should respond and that should mean growth. But I think all of that kind of is pulled together by, yeah, that expectation that there's a certain level of strategy in church that should unlock, you know, the doors to growth and that pastors who aren't doing that are failed pastors. ⁓ And I think that's where a lot of the shame that ⁓

pastors of small membership churches experience is because they don't just feel like they're pastoring a small church, they feel like they're pastoring a failed church. And I think that that is a narrative I'd very much like to correct and replace.

Well, ⁓ let's go at that a bit. So ⁓ what are some of the key advantages to doing God's mission and ministry that small membership churches possess as you've worked in this area for these many years that you've noticed?

Well, I talk in the book about several very specific things like worship and leadership development and mission. ⁓ And I think that the way I might summarize those things as kind of a key strength is I think a small church really does offer a level of particularity that is impossible in a large church. ⁓

And what I mean by that is large churches tend to be commuter churches that people drive in from a wide area. And so they tend to be attracting ⁓ demographically or socioeconomically or ethnically similar kinds of people from a broad area. And the church may be large, there may be 5,000 people in a building at one time, but there might be 100,000 people

in vicinity of the building and those people don't sort of meet the demographics ⁓ of the congregation, I think what a small church can do is it can just be radically specific for a group of people. ⁓ I know pastors who pastor in ⁓ rural Maine in towns that have ⁓ people who come to camp and ski and fish in the summer and...

people have water ski in the summer, then snow ski and things in the winter. And they do church services on the slopes with people who have come in over the weekend for a church. And I think a large church wouldn't risk, I think, the investment of something like that, because you don't know how it's going to turn out. I know people who do ministry to very specific industries, whether it's people in the arts or if it's bikers or it's food service workers, and they have services at times of day or days of the week.

⁓ where those people are available. ⁓ And I think those, the flexibility and the agility that comes with being small and particular is maybe the main strength. I think that's also the thing that people view as a major weakness because it feels like we're small and strange and there's not a lot of us and other people prefer other things. ⁓ But I think if you can lean into your particularity as a gift.

and as a strength that can be the most effective and strategic thing about a small church.

Well, if we think about this from a biblical perspective, you know, the New Testament churches were mostly pretty small from what we know. ⁓ And part of that was this contextualization. So part, hear you speaking to the freedom to contextualize ministry. Now, large churches can do that through having lots of different kinds of ministries under one umbrella, potentially, and some of them do that really well. But there's a different kind of relational dynamic in a small church. And I wonder if you could speak to that. And partly, I think, ⁓

One of the, I think the messages that people sometimes think about small churches is one of scarcity. You mentioned resources rather than abundance. And is there a way to kind of reframe that scarcity mindset toward abundance as we think about relationships and contextualization?

I'll try to stay on task, but the conversation about contextualization is one of my favorite, and that gets, ⁓ I can get down a rabbit trail. So feel free to rein me in if it goes off a little bit. I think kind of back to the previous point, large churches can survive without contextualizing to a particular group because they are often contextualized to a sort of average that has a large, for lack of a better word, market share.

So the people who are interested in mainstream movies and listen to pop music and eat at chain restaurants, like that, that sort of pitched at the people who most other things are pitched to. The people that are accommodated for in the broader society are often accommodated for in churches. What I think is a unique opportunity for small churches is to think about how to contextualize not just for a

region to say we're going to be a southern church or a Midwestern church or something, or even for a town, but very narrowly on a particular population near them ⁓ who are potentially marginalized or the kinds of people who are not accommodated for in the rest of the town or the broader society. ⁓ And I think that that level of contextualization where it's very specific to a group of people ⁓ can feel like if you focus

on those people at the margins, you'll alienate the larger group. But in my experience, when you tailor things for a very specific group of people, it actually makes your space more hospitable to people that you weren't trying to attract. So I think there's a level, a degree at which the more particular and the more focused and the more specific you can be, actually the more universally appealing ⁓ that the work can end up being.

And think that's the beginning of shifting a mindset from scarcity to abundance. If I think ⁓ I don't have what I need because I don't have this many programs or I don't have this kind of budget or I don't have this, ⁓ that is a cycle. I mean, to be honest, I know a lot of very large churches who feel exactly the same way. I don't know that you ever reach a budget where you feel like you have all the resources you need to do all the ministry you want. ⁓ And so I think

Maybe being honest with yourself about that is one place to start. But ⁓ I've forgotten his name, something. He's a community organizer, did some work for the first Obama campaign. ⁓ Marshall Gans, I think is his name. ⁓ He has a framework for community organizing. He says, you know, what do we have? What do we need? And how do we turn what we have into what we need?

And I think that's a shift ⁓ that I think can be really helpful for small churches is if you say, okay, the community has this need. Let's say after school, there are a lot of children who don't have any place to go because you have two working parents and et cetera. And we have a church filled with mostly elderly people who are lonely and looking for connection. Well, is there a way to connect your people who have time?

and relational resources with a group of people in the town who have a need. And if so, now suddenly you realize that our congregation is flush with the kinds of things that we need. ⁓ And now it doesn't, that doesn't read now as a liability. It, it reads as an asset. ⁓ I do think that being again, as focused in particular as possible is the first step in beginning to imagine that you have a lot or that you have enough.

to do what you've been called to do.

You're reminding me of a friend of mine who used to like to say, together by God's grace, we have everything that we need to kind of challenge that ⁓ shortage and help us see our abundant many gifts. So as we think about our gospel identity in our current cultural moment, how do you see ⁓ smaller membership congregations well positioned or even uniquely positioned to engage their communities and to reach out and share

⁓ and invite people to become Jesus followers.

A goal in contextualization is helping people hear the gospel in their heart language, helping them receive Jesus in ⁓ a dress and a mode of life and a way of being that feels resonant with them. ⁓ And there is offense in the gospel. ⁓ It's foolishness. It seems upside down. ⁓ But you want the offense to be the gospel and not your

poor presentation of the gospel or something, right? So I think when we're thinking in those terms, ⁓ I hate to make broad generalizations about whole generations, but I do think that ⁓ there's a lot of people in their late 30s to maybe early 50s for whom large institutions feel like a great way to cover up ugly things. And it doesn't...

It really doesn't matter if those large institutions are innocent of things. There's a lot that with scale comes the ability to kind of project a persona and hide the skeletons in your closet. And I think one asset that a small church has is that I've never been in a small church that felt like it was hiding something behind the smoke and mirrors of their worship service or behind their catchy social media.

presence or whatever, right? That there's something authentic about a smaller community that knows who it is and it knows who it's not, and it's not trying to be who it's not. ⁓ It's not pretending and it's not striving to change, but being kind of settled and confident in their identity in Christ, their identity as a called congregation that I think is a really ⁓ powerful and attractive

missional evangelistic tool in this particular moment. I think big churches will continue to get big, but, you know, there's even a, there's concern these days about large corporations and what kind of data do they have and can we trust what they're doing with their huge reserves of money? And I think a lot of that anxiety ⁓ is transferred into churches. And I think it's not that necessarily small churches are more virtuous, but I think they have less kind of deconstructing to do.

⁓ to be viewed in their neighborhood as agents for good who are trying to, you know, bring the peace of God's kingdom to their neighbors and not look like they're just doing savvy marketing to increase their numbers. And so I think that there's, yeah, something in the authenticity and simplicity that can have a huge appeal to a skeptical generation.

Let's talk a little bit about the shift in culture today. Your original version of this book, Strategically Small Church, came out 15 years ago. And now you've got this new and revised, expanded edition of it. ⁓ But let's just pause for a moment on what's changed in those 15 years in the American church landscape. And I'm thinking in particular of the rise of microchurch movements, fresh expressions. There does seem to be a turn toward the small.

And maybe it's also at the same time as mega churches continue to grow, it seems like maybe things are getting either smaller or larger and a lot of those churches in the middle are getting squeezed. But what's your take on what's changed?

So I think one thing that has changed, ⁓ I do think there's increased emphasis on the value of microchurches and missional expressions of church that are particular to very specific populations. And I attribute at least some of that to the emphasis in the last 15 years on urban ministry. I think microchurches make a lot of sense in a place like New York City, where a lot of people are skeptical of

60%, 50 % of churches were under 100 10 years ago. Now the numbers like 70 or 75 % are under 100. So more churches are smaller now than they used to be. You're exactly right that a lot of large churches are getting larger. And so the trend does seem to be that the bigger getting bigger, the smaller getting smaller. I think what has changed, a change that I've noticed is that pastors and denominations are becoming more comfortable acknowledging the

existence and value of small churches. So in the last couple of years, I've had a couple of denominations reach out to me because they put together a steering committee or a resource team or something to focus on the support of pastors in small churches. I think that's at least signaling to me an acceptance of the reality that these churches are small now, they will likely always be small, and that's not a problem.

that's a unique resource that needs to be leveraged and supported in a particular way. And I don't know that that's a universally accepted shift, but I do see that changing. And I'm pretty excited about that actually, because I'm hopeful that the next 20 years of ministry can be more life-giving for pastors in smaller places because they aren't feeling constantly beaten down by the metrics of their sending agency or denomination. ⁓ And I do think maybe the last thing I'll say is that

Certainly in the last 10 years, there have been a lot of things that have illustrated in American life just how diverse our population is in all kinds of ways. So we're diverse economically and ethnically and racially. ⁓ But there's just a lot of ideological division and other things. I think that ⁓ reaching different kinds of people means answering different kinds of questions and battling different kinds of

fair or unfair assumptions about Christ and Christianity and the, it's hard to do that at scale. I think scale works when a lot of people are the same, but I think as populations become more diverse and more divided, that it's going to take a lot of churches doing specific ministry among a lot of different

populations and then somehow being in fellowship with each other so that the pastors of those churches and congregations are in fact, you know, looking at their mission in a coordinated way. But yeah, I think those demographic shifts are, they were coming 15 years ago, but I think that those divisions or fault lines are much clearer now than they were even 15 years ago.

There's a lot of things that are driving what's happening in the life of congregations. One of the things that you talked about in your book that I found intriguing was this concept of we need to have congregations that have a minimally viable ecclesiology was the language you used consisting of worship, formation, and mission. Could you talk a little bit more about those and then why that's really helpful to have that sense of focus in a smaller membership congregation and this time?

So part of reason I wanted to articulate that in this version of the book is since the first edition came out, I've spent time with Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians and non-denominational groups and others and thought, you know, very often leadership, church leadership or church growth material does take ecclesiology for granted. It assumes certain leadership structures or certain membership structures or different kinds of things. And so in order

for this to be accessible to a wide range of people. I want to make sure that you know when I say church, I'm trying to be as broad as I can be, but church has to mean something more than just some people who are getting together to do things. And so I think that's where the emphasis on worship and mission and formation become important. ⁓ I think for worship, again, trying to take any emphasis on style or format out of the question is really important.

Worship can be a handful of people in a living room accompanied by music or unaccompanied by music, ⁓ or it could be a liturgy, it could be reading, it can be responsive prayer. So I think the format, ⁓ I'm sort of format agnostic or template agnostic, but I think that there has to be worship. ⁓ Formation is more internally focused. We're growing the people in our care, ⁓ discipleship and...

⁓ mentorship and that sort of thing. And then mission is the being active externally. And I think without going too far into it, you have groups that get together and they sing together and they think about formation. But if they're never engaged in the broader community, it's hard to think of them as a church in the New Testament sense, which is a sent body out into the world. And there are people who get together for formation and for, you know, community engagement. if it's not also coupled with worship, then it can just be

good community development that's not necessarily church activity, right? So I think having those three elements is important. But I think it's helpful for small churches to kind of whittle it down to those features in part because denominations either intentionally or unintentionally can put a fair amount of pressure on churches to run certain programs. ⁓ And, you know, if you're

I grew up Southern Baptist and if you weren't doing a wanna in the evening and you weren't doing an RAs program and you weren't doing Sunday school and you weren't doing a youth choir and you weren't doing something else, it was hard to feel like, well, are we a proper church if we can't do all of those things? ⁓ And so there's certain things that I think it can be liberating to say, whether I do those things or not, we are a proper church because we are engaged in worship, formation and mission. And we may do all of those things in a streamlined way. It doesn't, but.

you know, trying to identify yourself by particular programs or particular ministry philosophy or the things I think can be burdensome. But that minimum ecclesiology I think can be helpful.

Yeah, I loved your chapter on worship. I appreciated your book in general, I should say. I found your kind of worship is about God point that you make in that last chapter really powerful. So thanks for that.

Thank you, yeah.

So Brandon, I really appreciate you joining us for this conversation and for, think, speaking a really important message to a lot of those communities and those leaders out there who are, statistically we know are in smaller churches and say, look, those communities are there for God to use in particular ways. And ⁓ I think that's ⁓ something that we should lean into moving forward, thinking multiplication rather than just.

trying to scale everything up in the kind of ways that our culture might have us do.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to be with you.

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